Can The Newspaper Industry Really Be THIS Stupid About Google News?

The Business Insider weighs in on newspapers bitching about Google News:

We continue to marvel at the way the newspaper industry spins the existence of Google News.

Google News, the newspaper industry says, steals information that honest newspaper people have sweated and toiled to obtain, plasters it willy-nilly all over its own site, and then cashes in by selling advertising around it. This is theft, the newspaper industry says. Congress must put an immediate stop to it.

Can they really be serious?

Here at The Business Insider, we LOVE Google News. Why? Because when Google News lists one of our stories in a prominent position, our servers start smoking as thousands upon thousands of global readers immediately start reading it. When this happens, we don't wail and moan about those sleazy thieves at Google. We shout, "Yeah, baby!" and start high-fiving all around.

As Google has explained time and time again, and as Marissa Mayer told Congress yesterday, we could easily stop Google News from indexing our site by adding a line of code to our pages.

But why on earth would we want to do that?

As we see it, Google is advertising our stories for free. If the newspaper industry owned Google News, we have no doubt that we'd have to pay to be included in it. So if Google wants to make some money by helping their users find our content, we're all for it.

Newspaper industry executives aren't morons, so we suspect that, deep down, they're happy when Google News sends them zillions of readers, too. They just can't say that out loud. Because if they said that out loud, it would undermine the sense of entitlement they have developed after more than a century of printing money because THEY, not Google, were the most convenient way for people to get a good dose of news. And it's the end of that era, we suspect, that newspaper executives are really upset about.

How much money is your paper, or any, making from someone clicking over from Google News? And, knowing my own habits, just because I read a story linked on Google (or elsewhere) doesn't mean I'm going to your site. Where I'm not spending money anyway. Because your stuff that I would have to pay for in the bricks and mortar world is for free all over the Interwebs.

How much money is your paper, or any, making from someone clicking over from Google News? And, knowing my own habits, just because I read a story linked on Google (or elsewhere) doesn't mean I'm going to your site. Where I'm not spending money anyway. Because your stuff that I would have to pay for in the bricks and mortar world is for free all over the Interwebs.

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Well said. That's the issue here. Yeah, people are flocking your paper's Web site for the news, but they do so with no financial gain to the newspaper because there's no purchase being made and because there's no promise of a "brand loyalty" that will keep people coming back.

You're not getting the same person reading the site 1,000 times. You're getting 1,000 people reading the site once.

Under what scenario does our current path lead to anything but death? Does Google news lead so many people to our Dimpimple County School Board story that the $.005 we make per page view on the ad can fund it?

How about the Eastern-Western football game? Google news going to draw tons of people in on that?

We have a product people want. They currently do not have to pay a dime for that product. When they return to paying a dime for it, we will resume making money. Ads may never come back the way they were in 1975; they're going away now because so are the readers. And the readers are leaving because why pay a dime for something that's online for free?

Maybe an industry leader making a bold move that works will encourage everyone to follow suit in the next few years.

In 10 years you may be reading your local newspaper on your Kindle, but you're going to have to pay for at least some of it. Web advertising has proven insufficient no matter how many people Google news sends to the website. All the RSS feeds and and link-throughs are awesome ... if the consumer is paying. Otherwise it's just a more convenient way for us to give away our product for next to nothing. And then, death.

And then we're depending on unpaid citizen journalism (or citizen journalism that, gasp, charges a subscription fee) and PR to provide information on city council meetings and school board proposals.

I grow more and more convinced every day that happy, shiny, friendly, oh-so-useful Google is a Science Fiction-esq evil entity bent on control of every aspect of our online lives, in a monopoloy more vast and crushing than anything Bill Gates or John D. Rockefeller ever dreamed of.

But that mostly applies to general online activity, not so much newspapers. I agree the general online news dilemma predates them, and they're just taking advantage of the situation.

$15 a month will get you home delivery if you want it, unlimited web access.
A la carte, you can pay $3 a month for sports, $3 a month for business, $1 a month for school boards, $2 a month for city council, &tc.
And for the linkthroughs, you pay $.25 per story. Some smart person invents a paypal style system where you subscribe.

I live on the east coast but I love the Dodgers (hypothetically) ... AP does a good enough job with gamers, but I prefer local coverage. I go to L.A. Times website and can pay $3 a month to read all the Dodgers' game stories, notebooks, features, whatever. Or I can click the "Read it now" button and my PayPal-ish account is charged a quarter.

Yes, this means we ALL need to produce a superior web product. But if we don't have confidence in ourselves to put out something worth paying for, what the

By the looks of its contacts page, The Business Insider and its siblings have a combined staff of 10, including one (1) advertising salesperson. I would think if all that traffic were doing them much good, they would need more of a sales staff to handle the vast demand.

The guy who runs the sites, Henry Blodget, got into a bit of trouble over securities fraud: